


I have brittle bones it seems

by stepquietly



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Frankenstein AU, Original Character Death(s), Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:20:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1220956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepquietly/pseuds/stepquietly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It might be that no one else noticed because they weren’t looking. </p><p>(Frankenstein AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I have brittle bones it seems

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cthonical (Nellie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nellie/gifts).



> A while ago Nellie mentioned that she wanted more Ymir/Krista, and I know how she loves Frankenstein, and I basically thought, "screw it, throw it all in a pot and we'll see what sticks." Title taken from Daughter's 'Candles.' 
> 
> So, dramatic story is super dramatic and somewhat messed up. This hasn't been beta read. Comma abuse, run on clauses. You were warned.

_The last frozen day has come and gone, and we were_  
sleeping in the elbows of trees and in the elbow of a town,  
our sutures all sunken together as if we shared one wound,  
as if we had climbed from a single pit.  
\-- Paul Nemser, ‘Meeting You After Chernobyl’

* * *

 

It’s not that Historia hadn’t been told about the titans, hadn’t heard, somewhere between the whispers of her mother’s shame and the dishonour of her own existence, of the fact that the family that refused her had brought something terrible to bear upon the world. All the chatter was about sex and birth, the creatures they’d made, the way they ate flesh when they didn’t have to and built themselves new bodies out of old bones, and hid and hid and hid inside until they didn’t hide, and then they came after you.

It was like eating secrets for dinner every day. She felt her teeth blunt in her mouth and her tongue thick with submission and respect, swallowing back the taste of iron and ash. It made her heavy, dogged her breath and her steps, pressed gently on her shoulders while she sat through classes where tutors told her one improbable thing after another and never told her why or how or when her family had decided that living was a poor substitute for keeping flesh and bone together.

Eventually, when Historia couldn’t stop thinking about it and couldn’t hide from the whispers any more she realized that joining the corps was really the only way forward. She could leave behind the bad science, the half truths in her books. She could pay tribute to her family’s legacy in the blood they’d spent all her life denying, and spend it on the creatures they’d raised.

She would bury Historia somewhere deep inside Krista, and make herself a new person, fashioned out of the rags of her own flesh and lies as answers to questions no one even cared to ask.

* * *

  
But then, all those months later, there was Ymir. Ymir, whose skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones and whose arms had tattoos that appeared and disappeared like magic. Krista could swear that she once saw the name of a dead man’s wife, crudely scraped but inked deep into the curve of a bicep, but when she looked again a month later it was gone, replaced with a slimmer arm that boasted smooth, clear skin.

She said nothing. The wife’s name sat heavy in the back of her throat ‘til she forgot what it was. The taste of it faded behind her still blunted teeth.

But maybe no one else noticed because they weren’t looking, weren't fascinated already. This, after all, was the unspoken rule of the barracks where you didn’t look, you didn’t see, you didn’t hear, and you took comfort when and if you could. It was like being back home but once again, Krista was looking, like she’d forgotten to excise this part of Historia when she cut out all the old chunks of herself. She could help herself, but she wouldn’t; she’d keep looking, sly, out of the corner of her eyes, because she was raised on secrets and here was a delicious one. It seemed so obvious, outlined in the way that Ymir was never one uniform colour all over but always shifting, a lighter hand, a darker leg, the shadowed curve of her back, stitches all over because they’re in the survey corps now and even they need to hold flesh and bone together chasing creatures.

It’s like knowing and not knowing, and Krista is oddly comfortable with the way there’s yet another secret that no one talks about. That their comrades and friends might go away, might vanish or break somewhere between their bases and the cities and in the heavy underbrush of the woods was terrible, but then Ymir would bring some part of them back with her. At times it was something so small and insignificant that Krista wouldn’t even notice it until it was gone. Then she’d remember Antje’s thin hands holding a spoon or Yamato’s high arched feet, but by then Ymir had moved on to something else so Krista could never be sure.

It never occurred to her that the reason no one discussed it was that no one knew. At least not until Ymir took her away, wrapped her in mismatched arms, stitches hidden under the fabric of her uniform, and whispered that Krista could come with her, Bertolt, and Reiner. That they’d have to show her all the things her family wouldn’t admit to because even the creatures themselves hadn’t found the words yet.

“ _Come with us_ ,” Ymir begs, intense and desperate, like this is hardly a choice. There’s a ring on her finger that’s catching the light, enough that Krista remembers Max’s high-pitched laugh and broad hands. Krista stares at it because Max is gone now, wandered off in the night after a game of cards, gone outside to piss and never come back home. Krista misses him now, a loss that feels bone-deep. It's enough to put her hand in his and squeeze. She means it for both of them when she says yes.  
*  
Ymir waits less than a day, just far away from camp that they would know when people tried to catch up, before she begins scratching at Krista, playing with her food. She rakes her nails down her back and leaves bite marks high on the curve of her hip. She kisses Krista until Krista can't breathe, her mouth sore and sensitive, and trails her fingers over her breasts and down to her cunt.

Krista is swollen with her, wet with the way Ymir is breaking her into her parts and pieces, crying out low in her throat when Ymir eventually licks into her. She eats Krista out like she wants to climb into Krista’s skin, blood warm and heavy, wants to taste what's under her skin, nipping harsh at the insides of her thighs, bruising her.

“You know about us,” Ymir asks, and it’s not a question. Krista nods though she can barely move, grounded so deep into her body by pleasure. “You’re one of those that made us,” and Ymir slides a finger into her.

Krista tenses up all over again, her joints spasming with fear and this hollow ache. She thinks of Max and how his finger is in her now, how all the people that make up the muscles and bones of Ymir are spread out over her, in her, like it takes a village to make her, and comes.

Ymir kisses her, biting her lip so hard that Krista wonders if she’ll - if _she’ll_ need stitches.

“Your name,” Ymir asks, and Krista whispers, trying to speak without spitting blood, “Historia.”

* * *

  
It's the four of them together, but Krista can’t stop thinking of Ymir. She forgets the others to focus on Ymir's loose hair and wild eyes, and the way she, Reiner and Bertolt went hunting yesterday.

They came back and brought Berwick with them, complacent and happy to have friends since he’d been scouting so long. It took minutes for each of them to stake out a piece. Reiner needed a new pair of legs and Bertolt wanted the veins in his arms. Ymir said she was hungry, so hungry, and stared right at Krista when she bit deep into Berwick’s flesh and tore it straight off the bone.

In the dark later, Krista traces her trembling fingers over her arm, up to her shoulder, and across her chest, imagining the path Ymir would take to rip pieces from her. Ymir loves to put her teeth into the sinews at Krista’s shoulders, leave slow biting kisses down to her breasts. Even feather-light, the touch makes her flinch, imagining the heft of flesh pulled, the pressure of Ymir’s jaws, the heat of her breath.

When Ymir brings in her food the next day, Krista finds herself drawn to the hunk of meat that lies atop the meagre portion of rice, holds the jagged edges of its bones tight between both hands. They press sharp into her palm. She bites down and the fat and juices drip down her chin; forced from the meat, they run in trails down her arms.

For the first time, Krista feels the sharpness of her own teeth, feels a wildness welling up behind her own eyes.

It mixes salty with the taste of the meat.

* * *

  
“Will you eat me?” she finds herself asking Ymir the morning after, still waiting near the plate with its single bone. She’d stared at the bone all night but its crude edges told her nothing about what or who it came from. It's nothing but curves where the muscle has pushed groove, and marrow in its hollow to be scraped out as an extra treat. It could be deer, it could be horse, it could be one of her friends. She could be eating whatever remained of Berwick.

She thought she’d tremble when she asked, that there would be tears in her eyes, but all she can feel is the anticipation sitting warm in her full stomach.

Ymir pauses.

“You’ve eaten others. I know you have.” Krista looks away deliberately, turns her chin to indicate the bones hanging from the trees outside, hollowed out with small holes deliberately pushed through so that the wind can knock and sing through them. It's the crudest of warning systems for a change in the ecosystem. “I’ve grown up hearing stories of your kind.”

Ymir snorts. “What you heard couldn’t have been anything like the truth, little Historia.” The words cut cleaner than teeth.

“Then tell me,” she pleads. “Isn’t that why I’m here?”

Ymir looks away and won’t respond after that, no matter how often Krista calls her name.

* * *

  
The second scout stumbles over them a week later. She manages to surprise them if only because she falls out of the trees while trying to fly past them, her harness caught in one of their bone lines. There's the sound of hollow, low-pitched knocking together before Rosa falls into the middle of their camp, stunned and confused. Her expression shifts rapidly to horror before Reiner uses his fist to lay her flat.

His knife is out and swiped across her throat before Krista would have even thought to move.

“Which parts do we want?” He asks the others, casual, and the three of them bicker because they’ve only just taken the previous scout. This is extravagance, the choice to eat or change yet again.

Krista barely listens. She watches the way Rosa's blood is soaking into the forest floor, inured to her own precarious position in the group. She's somehow more secure for it, feels safer in the lack of safety, sore in her nipples and cunt from Ymir’s attentions.

She can't look away from the blood and the way the body lies, graceless. Her attention is caught by the sweep of muscle down Rosa’s back, its lean length and the way it flows into the curve of Rosa's ass. She’s speaking before she even thinks. “Her back, for me,” she says, and that stops them talking.

“For Ymir,” she clarifies, feeling the flush rising in her cheeks, the sharpness of her teeth, “but for me.” Ymir stares at her, cat eyes watching every swallow, every breath.

That they agree isn’t a shock, but that Ymir makes her sit by Rosa’s body is. Ymir slices like she’s an old hand at this, quick decisive strokes with no hesitation. It's the same way she uses her gear, the same way she fucks her tongue into Krista. She dumps the heavy mess of muscle and blood into Krista’s hands, warm and dripping, for her to hold while the others claim their own parts.

Krista keeps her hands tight on the slippery muscle, fingers tacky with drying blood. She watches as Ymir strips down, her movements unconcerned; watches Bertolt take up the knife and slice into Ymir’s back, Ymir shuddering under him like the knife pushing into her is good, like she would arch into it if she didn’t have to keep still. The blood that oozes around the edges is red-black and already congealing. Krista shudders for her, skin sensitive and prickling.

It takes hours and hours before Bertolt takes Rosa’s - takes the weight of it from her, holds it in place while Reiner threads a needle and makes small, careful stitches to hold the muscles in place, and then to put the skin together. There’s rows upon rows of stitches in the muscle, like Ymir is intricate with embroidery under the stark surface she pretends. Krista watches Rosa’s back start from under Ymir’s hair and goes loose and wanting, wet between her legs.

“Let me,” she mutters, scrambling forward gracelessly on her knees, and reaching for the needle in Reiner’s hands. “ _Let me_.”

“Let her,” Ymir agrees, and Krista can’t help herself any more. She puts her mouth to where the skin meets, kisses it so her lips stick to the darkening blood, shudders, and thinks about biting down.


End file.
